Gut-Shot Read Free Page B

worried expression spread to Flintlock’s face like a contagion.
    â€œHell, Jake, you can’t splint a man’s shoulder,” he said.
    â€œNo need for that,” Ruskin said. “Strip the holsters off Willie’s gun rig and bring me the cartridge belt.”
    Flintlock did as the bounty hunter asked.
    Ruskin buckled the cartridge belt around Glover’s neck then, as gently as a woman, eased the old man’s arm into the sling it created.
    â€œWhen you get home, get that gal of yours to make a better sling out of one of her unmentionables or something,” he said.
    The gunman smiled. “You’re a tough old coot, Dave, but don’t try to move that arm for three, maybe four weeks. Understand?”
    â€œI’ll mind every word that was spoke, Jake,” Glover said. “But I got to tell you, boy, it’s punishing me like hell.”
    â€œThen drink plenty of whiskey.”
    â€œHow about hot gin punch?”
    â€œIt’ll do the same thing,” Ruskin said. “Make you numb.”
    â€œDamn it all, Jake, but you’re true-blue,” Glover said. “I’m glad Sammy didn’t plug you out of sheer spite. He does that kind of thing, you know, and he ain’t to be trusted.”
    â€œNor am I,” Ruskin said.
    Flintlock smiled. “I ain’t over this yet, so see you don’t push it, Jake,” he said. “As Dave says, by times I can be a spiteful man.”
    Â 
    Â 
    Dave Glover said that Jake Ruskin had acted the white man and as they were both Masons the gunman was allowed to bury his dead and ride out of camp.
    Flintlock drove the wagon to the old man’s partially built house, a frail skeleton of angled timbers and one boarded-up gable wall. Behind the rickety structure was a large outhouse. Flintlock couldn’t make up his mind whether or not it was a two-holer, a rare luxury on the frontier at that time, or if Dave had built it oversized to accommodate the derriere of his intended.
    Behind the wall stood a large brass bed with billowy white pillows and a patchwork quilt.
    Glover had rigged a canvas tarp over the bed and Flintlock reckoned the old coot would be snug enough beside his fat gal if it didn’t rain too hard.
    Maybelline Bell made a fluttering fuss over her wounded husband-to-be, and then gave Flintlock a bear hug that was perhaps more enthusiastic than was strictly necessary.
    He enjoyed it though.

CHAPTER THREE
    Sam Flintlock was thirty-nine years old the day he rode into the town of Open Sky, a thriving settlement in the Blue Mountain country of the Oklahoma Territory.
    He was short, stocky and as rough as a cob. A shock of unruly black hair showed under his wide-brimmed, much abused hat and his eyes, gray as a sea mist, were set deep under shaggy eyebrows. His mustache was full, in the dragoon style then fashionable on the frontier. He walked with the horseman’s stiff-kneed gait, and, if he’d felt inclined, he could have sold his clothes, including his scuffed, down-at-heel boots, for at least a dollar. Flintlock was tough, enduring, raised hard by hard men for a wild, unforgiving land. But there was no cruelty in him. He had much honesty of tongue, a quick, wry sense of humor, and his word was his bond.
    He liked whores, children and dogs and was kind to all of them.
    He’d killed a dozen men, three as a lawman, the rest since he entered the bounty-hunting profession, and none of them disturbed his sleep o’ nights. The only ghost he ever saw was that of the grandfather who’d raised him, wicked, profane old Barnabas the mountain man who’d been following the devil’s buffalo herds this past ten years and more.
    Barnabas was enough of a haunting for any man.
    Open Sky was prospering from the cattle and lumber trades and could afford its own law, a man Flintlock knew only by reputation.
    Marshal Tom Lithgow had been a guard for the Butterfield stage line, a railroad